Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Staunton, May 25 – Much attention
has been devoted to the possibility that the doping scandal that has engulfed
Russian sports will lead the International Olympic Committee to ban Russian
athletes from participating in the upcoming Rio Games and that FIFA will follow
and strip Russia of its right to host the 2018 World Cup competition.

But because of those possibilities,
there is another, Vladislav Inozemtsev argues: Moscow could unilaterally
boycott Rio. “We already took such a decision in the Soviet ties which are so
beloved by our leadership,” he points out, suggesting that the propaganda
explanations for such a step are obvious (snob.ru/selected/entry/108803).

“How
can [Russians] take part in competitions organized according to rules dictated
by the United States?” Russian outlets will ask. And they will further enquire:
How can they do so especially “in Latin America where Panama can’t keep banking
secrets?” or “in Brazil where parliament is seeking to impeach a president for
stealing from a national energy company?”

The
Moscow commentator’s speculation comes at the end of an article in which he
argues that the current scandals in the Russian sporting world are anything but
unexpected in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and that, for three reasons, they tell
far more about what is going on there than almost anything else.

First
of all, Inozemtsev says, what Russia has done in sports is a reflection of what
it wants to be able to do in all sectors: it wants to create a situation in
which “all methods are considered acceptable” and where Moscow’s ability to “violate
all rules” is a measure of its having lifted Russia from its knees.

“If
it is permissible to send a killer with radioactive polonium to the capital of
a European state, if one can seize part of the territory of neighboring
countries, it is logical to use doubtful offshores” as a means of recapturing
stolen money, “then why in the end should one observe the rules, given that the
Kremlin has declared Russian sport a battlefield in politics and ideology?”

Given
that today “no one believes Russia about anything” given this approach, no one
should be surprised that the international community is focusing more on
Russian athletes than on others or that this will continue for a long time to
come. That is the true measure of Putin’s achievement, the commentator
suggests.

Second,
he continues, the only surprise is that it took the world this long to
recognize what Moscow was doing at the Sochi Olympiads.Anyone who studies the pattern of Russian
medal winners in Olympiads since the 1970s can see that Russia was losing out
over time but suddenly at Sochi won 4.5 times as many medals as it did in the
previous games.

Some
are inclined to explain this by reference to a home field advantage, but an
examination of the fate of other national teams who competed in Olympics abroad
and then in one at home does not support that contention, Inozemtsev says. Such
teams benefitted some but nothing on the Russian scale.

And
third, there is another reason why Russia is doping its athletes to win
victories: sports are increasingly a big money operation, and concerns about
doping have tracked the rise of money athletes can earn and that host
governments can take in. Given the centrality of cash in Putin’s world, it
should not surprise anyone that he has been prepared to go for broke.

But
the real reason is “the underlying attitude of the Russian political elite to
any rules,” he continues. “this elite considers that honesty is something left
over from the past, that a man of principle is a fool, and that the one who is
prepared to be the most deceptive will win out and become successful.”

Such
an approach may work on occasion, Inozemtsev says; but it clearly works best when
it is used least often. However, “if such an attitude becomes the only
permissible one, then one won’t have to wait very long for problems to arise.”
That is especially the case in a field like international athletics.

“Unlike
the publication of compromising financial documents,” he points out, actions in
that field “are visible and obvious.” Punishments are something that can be
meted out by officials and are easily understood by all. If the IOC strips
Russia of only four or five medals from Sochi, the country’s ranking will fall
from first to fourth or fifth.

Given
that that would be only the first step on the road to the disqualification of
Russian athletes for the upcoming Olympics, Russian officials have to decide
how to react. So far, as the article by Sports Minister Vitaly Mutkov in the
London “Times” shows, they have decided to follow “the best Russian
bureaucratic traditions” and blame the athletes “who deceived us.”

That
may not be enough, however, to persuade the IOC that Russia should be allowed
to take part in the Rio Games. And if it strips Russia of that right, Moscow
will have to come up with more effective propaganda, perhaps presenting the CIS
Spartakiad in the Russian capital this summer as the “true” Olympics.

That
might suit the Kremlin’s needs because in that competition one can be sure,
Russian athletes will garner just as many medals as the FSB decides in advance
and as the country’s anti-doping agency allows to win through.